Owen Paterson, until recently the environment secretary, will be speaking to the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a think tank known for its climate change scepticism. Bob Ward looks at what he will say, writing that Paterson is in desperate need of some extra tuition from climate scientists.

More details are emerging of serious flaws in a controversial speech that the former environment secretary, Owen Paterson, is due to deliver to climate change ‘sceptics’ on 15 October. Paterson is sure to receive an enthusiastic welcome form the audience at the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the campaign group set up by Lord Lawson to lobby against government policies to reduce emissions of greenhouse gas emissions.

With the Foundation’s public relations machine on full throttle, Paterson has been enjoying effusive coverage from right-wing newspapers which share his contempt for environmentalists, who he describes collectively as “the green blob”. But Paterson, who was sacked from the Cabinet in July, will undermine the credibility of his argument with significantly inaccurate and misleading assertions about energy and climate change policy.

First, he will claim that including more sources of renewable energy, such as wind farms, in the UK’s power system risks “the lights going out”. But this prophecy of doom simply does not stand up to scrutiny. Wind farms, of course, generate variable amounts of power depending on weather conditions, but this can be managed in a number of ways, including by providing back-up electricity from gas-fired power stations. Indeed, the Government established a capacity market to create such a safeguard against potential shortages through the Energy Act which received Royal Assent last year. Paterson knows this because he voted for it in Parliament.

It is true that the UK needs about £100 billion in investment in new energy infrastructure by 2020, and without it the power system would struggle to meet future demand. But Paterson’s suggestion that the Climate Change Act should be scrapped is just the kind of intervention by a politician that creates uncertainty for the private sector and undermines the confidence of investors. It is the risk caused by inconsistent policy-making, as advocated by Paterson’s reversal on the Climate Change Act (which he also voted for), that threatens to plunge the UK into darkness, rather than the intermittency of renewable energy sources.

The former environment secretary, Owen Paterson

The second glaring hole in his argument relates to his lack of knowledge and understanding of the risks of climate change. Paterson has repeatedly shown that he struggles with the details of the science of climate change, but in his speech will claim to “readily accept the main points of the greenhouse theory”. This is hardly a remarkable concession, since it is about 200 years since Joseph Fourier first identified the greenhouse effect caused by the Earth’s atmosphere, and 150 years since John Tyndall demonstrated in a laboratory that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas.

But Paterson will also state: “Over the past 35 years, the Earth’s atmosphere has warmed nothing like as fast as forecast and over the last 18 years it has not warmed at all, according to some sources”. This shows that he has not consulted reliable scientific sources of information. It is simply untrue that the Earth has not warmed since 1995. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change points out in its comprehensive and authoritative recent assessment, global average surface temperature has been increasing at a rate of about 0.05 centigrade degrees per decade since 1998.

This is lower than the long-term rate of warming since 1951 of 0.12 centigrade degrees per decade, but the slowdown is due to the temporary effect of natural factors, such as an increase in the amount of volcanic aerosols, which tend to cause cooling, in the atmosphere, and a cyclical reduction in the amount of radiation from the Sun.

However, the long-term projections by climate scientists continue to show that by the end of the century, if greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere continue to grow at the current rate, global average temperature could be three degrees or more higher than at the start of the Industrial Revolution, when the widespread burning of fossil fuels began. Such levels of global warming would take the Earth’s temperature to its highest level since the Pliocene Epoch three million years ago, and would create a prehistoric climate that modern Homo sapiens has not experienced before.

The lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people across the planet would be transformed and disrupted by the impacts of such a change in climate, as sea levels rise, deserts grow, and patterns of extreme weather intensify and shift. For Paterson to overlook these risks, because of his flawed interpretation of cherry-picked facts about recent temperature trends, shows that he is in desperate need of some extra tuition from climate scientists. And until he shows a willingness to fully embrace the scientific evidence, he will struggle to have his pronouncements on energy and climate change taken seriously by anyone other than fellow ‘sceptics’.

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the British Politics and Policy blog, nor of the London School of Economics. Please read our comments policy before posting. Featured image credit: Policy Exchange CC BY 2.0

[…] of Northern Rock bank. Shortly after being removed from his post by the Prime Minister, Mr Paterson delivered a speech to Lord Lawson’s lobby group for climate change ‘sceptics’, the Global Warming […]

Its statement on 30 September included the following conclusion that “The Commission found that taken as a whole, it was difficult not to form the conclusion that the publications and postings on the charity’s website promoted a particular position on global warming. The website could not be regarded as a comprehensive and structured educational resource sufficient to demonstrate public benefit. In areas of controversy, education requires balance and neutrality with sufficient weight given to competing arguments. The promotion of a particular view or position would not equate to education.”

In the Earth’s attempt to recover from the Ice Age (which likely began with a global dust cloud from a very large meteor thousands of years ago), temperatures will continue to warm until there are ‘gators in Minnesota again. That’s right – Minnesota, not Florida. In short, we have a lot of warming to do until our planet gets back to normal. To fight Mother Nature over climate change is plain silly. To deny that the Earth is coming out of the Ice Age is sillier.

That said, the current debate over climate change submerges a very real cause for concern suggested by unprecedented levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere going back 400,000 years according to ice core samples from Antarctica. Plus, the ice core samples show that each time there were elevated carbon dioxide levels during those 40 thousand centuries, there was a corresponding warm spell in the Earth’s temperatures, which suggests the possibility of a causal relationship.

With unprecedented amounts of carbon dioxide in today’s atmosphere, we should be talking about whether the Earth’s warming from the Ice Age is ‘ACCELERATING’? Is global warming, which is a fact and in accordance with Mother Nature, accelerating due to unprecedented levels of (fossil fuel burning, pollution, etc) carbon dioxide? In other words, are we humans accelerating climate change with our pollution?

Disclaimer

Articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of LSE British Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Please read our comments policy before commenting.